Virtual Reality in the Rehabilitation 
Cecília Sik Lányi1, Barnabás Takács2, Lajos Simon3, Viktória Simon3, Viktória Laky1, Ádám Tilinger1
1 Colour and Multimedia Laboratory, University of Veszprém
e-mail: lanyi@almos.vein.hu
2 Digital Elite, Los Angeles
e-mail: BTakacs@digitalElite.net
3 Semmelweis Medical University in Budapest
e-mail: simon@psych.sote.hu
Abstract
Nowadays the virtual reality (VR) is very popular. It is an artificial world, which is made in a computer environment and the user try to enter fully into the spirit of her or his role in this unreal-world. Virtual Environment (VE) technology has undergone a transition in the past few years that has taken it out of the realm of expensive toy and into that of functional technology. Recently, in the field of Mental Healthcare, the considerable potential of VEs has been recognized for the scientific study. This paper summarizes the application of VR and presents the VR education and research in the University of Veszprém.
Categories and Subject Descriptors: [Education and other fields of Applied Informatics or Computer Graphics]: Virtual Environments
Key Words and Phrases: Virtual Reality, application, rehabilitation, education
Introduction
There are a lot of definitions of Virtual Reality. One of these is the definition of Prof Riva: Virtual Reality is a multimodal interaction with dynamic and responsive computer generated or so called synthetic environments. It’s goal is to produce in the user the same feeling or most similar feeling as in the real world creates thus it should produce the into same effect as in vivo. Another definition is Prof Rizzo’s definition: VR is a way for humans to visualize, manipulate, and interact with computers and extremely complex data in a more naturalistic fashion.
	Virtual Environment (VE): is a three dimensional data set describing an environment based on real-world or abstract objects and data. Usually virtual environment and virtual reality are used synonymously. But some authors reserve VE for an artificial environment that the user interacts with.
The concept was used originally for the immersive virtual reality. This is an environment that corresponds completely to that of a real environment. At present the borders get blurred, as e,g, one usually groups here also such three dimensional worlds, realized on a graphic display or stereo projector, where the user can orient itself with the help of a mouse. There also such virtual realities that mix the virtual objects with real environments, such are the augmented/mixed realities. 
Augmented reality: the use of transparent glasses on which a computer displays data sothat the viewer can view the data superimposed on real-world scenes.
When using VR people often experience a feeling of actually being in the computer generated environment, a feeling described as ‘presence’. (Presence: illusion of being part of a virtual environment. The more immersive a VE experience, often the greater the sense of being part of experience.) Presence can more explicitly be defined as a mediated experience that seems very much like it is not mediated. When a user experiences a high level of presence, it is even possible for the user to develop fear in response to simulated anxiety-provoking stimuli. Experiments have for instance and fear of heights. This makes it possible for VR to be used in the treatment of phobia, where patients have to be exposed to the stimuli they fear. VR has already been shown to be effective in the treatment of fear of heights, fear of flying, arachnophobia, claustrophobia and agoraphobia, the fear of being in places from which escape might be difficult or embarrassing. VE cannot and should not be viewed as a replacement of medical treatment. 
The research and development
Several people suffer from various phobias, while most of them can surmount it by simple self-suggestion and it doesn’t cause too much trouble for them, for others this form of fear could significantly limit their life. A phobia is a type of anxiety disorder. Phobias can be divided into three categories: social phobia, agoraphobia and specific phobia. Social phobia is a fear of being judged in social or performance situations. Agoraphobia is a fear of public places and open spaces. Specific phobia is a fear of a specific object or situation, such as airplanes, spiders or heights. Aim of our work at the University of Veszprém and SOTE was creating virtual environments, which could be used in treating phobias. Of course we were unable to undertake the research all of the existing phobias, we created virtual worlds for treating agoraphobia (fear of wide, open spaces), acrophobia (fear of height) and .specific phobia (fear of travelling). Our investigation were the first ones in Hungary.
The first environment is a simple balcony of a two-storied house. It has a large tiled floor and low fence all around it. On the initial scene we could see the top of some trees and some houses. After starting the animation the viewpoint takes the users closer and closer to the fence and makes them look down to the garden.
The external glass elevator environment shows a ten-storied building with an external glass elevator. At the beginning the elevator is on the ground floor. Then the elevators starts and finally one has the view from the top of the building. These VE were created by the help of VRML. The internal glass elevator will be very similar to the external one, but there are some differences. The main difference is that we developed this virtual environment by using the program Maya. The main reason for using another method for developing is to compare the developing environments. First we made real video recording in the Atrium Hyatt Hotel in Budapest. The model of the internal glass elevator is made on the base of the real pictures of these video recordings. We would like to compare not only the developing environments (VRML and Maya) but also the virtual worlds with the real video recording in treating phobias too. For specific phobias (fear of travelling) we modelled the underground travelling in Budapest. 
We developed VE for claustrophobia too: a closed lift and a room, where the wall can be moved. We are finding and building the appropriate hardware configuration for testing by the help of a psychological institute (Semmelweis Medical University in Budapest) and some students, who suffer from light phobias. Thus up to now we haven’t tested the environments on individuals, who suffer from high, complex phobias.
For the education we developed a virtual shopping software for autistic children. This educational software was developed using Dark Basic programming language. We are testing the virtual shopping scenario in a special school for mentally disabled children in Veszprém.